The present invention relates to an automatic device for marking out and/or dividing up a flat sheet of glass, which can be positioned upstream of a sheet cutting line, for forming rectilinear incisions thereon.
Numerous devices for performing the marking out and/or dividing up of a sheet of flat glass before this is supplied to a sheet cutting line are known; the simplest known device is manually positioned and consists of a platform for supporting the sheet and over which there is movable, along a first axis, a crosspiece carrying a plurality of carriages slidable thereon along a second axis perpendicular to the first; the carriages are each provided with a suitable tool which can incise a score line in the sheet and are positioned manually on the crosspiece in such a way that, by making this latter move the tools can score rectilinear incisions on the sheet itself along the said two orthogonal axes. A second known device, similar to that described above, but operable automatically to perform the positioning and scoring operations on the sheet, conssists of a platform provided with a crosspiece carrying a plurality of carriages each provided with an incising tool, each of which carriages is provided with its own stepping motor controlled by a suitable central control unit. Of the two devices described above, the first has the disadvantage of not being able to position the tools automatically, and consequently has little flexibilty in use in that the times taken to set up the tool before commencing the operation itself are relatively long and it is necessary to repeat the setting up each time the type of work is changed; the second device on the other hand has the disadvantage of a high cost due to the necessity of providing each carriage with its own motor. There have also been proposed automatic marking out and/or dividing up devices which are provided with a single carriage movable along the crosspiece and which is able to perform all the incising operations; it is clear however that a carriage carrying a single tool can perform only a single incision at a time and therefore such a device takes a relatively long time to perform the work.